ABOUT ME

Hello, my name is Daniel Puscher. I recently graduated from Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
with a degree in computer science. In my studies I have conducted research mainly in the fields of
online social networks, privacy, interface-design and user behavior.
In my bachelor thesis I was working on an innovative interface to manage privacy settings on a social
network (using the example of Facebook). User studies showed the superiority of this approach compared
to the existing interface on Facebook. So I decided to implemented a browser extension for Mozilla
Firefox (which was later ported to Google Chrome) that added the interface to Facebooks Website. The
extension was very successfull and it was mentioned by many newspapers, radio stations
and websites (see Projects and Press).

As my studies continued, I repeatedly did research in the field of online social networks and
continuously improved my privacy extension.
In my master thesis I analyzed the user behavior in online networks - again using the example of
Facebook. As there were no suitable data sources for the questions I wanted to research, I implemented a
browser extension that was able to fetch all needed information about the user behavior (see "Facebook
Privacy Watcher" at Projects). Using the collected data, I was able to gain new
insights into the behaviour of users on Facebook. The results of my studies will be published as
scientific papers in the next months.

Simplicity and usability as primary goals!

When developing software, I always try to make it as simple as possible to use. My goal is to keep the
usability of my programs so high that even unexperienced users can use it without much explanation.

PROJECTS

These are the published projects I worked on lately:

FACEBOOKPRIVACY WATCHER

Facebook Privacy Watcher

"Facebook Privacy Watcher" is a browser extension that emerged from the results of my
bachelor thesis. It provides an innovative interface to overlook and change the privacy
settings on Facebook easily.
The basic idea is that people can gather information more easily when it is associated
with colors. To ensure that the system can be used and understood with much less effort,
the settings were directly involved in the profile page of Facebook and were linked with
colors.

The first version of "Facebook Privacy Watcher" was released on October 15, 2012.
Immediately after the publication of the extension it received considerable attention in
the press, so that the extension was downloaded about 2,500 times in the first week.
Many radio stations and newspapers were interested and reported on the extension (see
"Press"). Extensive media coverage led to high download-counts (up to 3500 per day). To
date, was downloaded around 60,000 times from users from 141 countries and currently has
over 11,000 active users.

FACEBOOKPRIVACY ANALYZER

Facebook Privacy Analyzer

"Facebook Privacy Analyzer" is a browser extension that I have implemented as a small
part of my master thesis. It was designed to measure extremely detailed usage data when
using Facebook. Various methods are combined like Javascript injection, analysis of HTTP
request and monitoring of user interactions with the browser.

The collected data was analyzed in my thesis (publication of the results in a paper
pending). As a bonus, users were able to access their personal statistics that were
generated server-side every day using the submitted usage data.

Overall, over 2300 people participated in the study, installed the extension and sent
their usage data to me which allowed me to make interesting analysis.

Lifehacker

03.12.2012

Facebook Privacy Watcher Color Codes Your Privacy Settings

Firefox: Facebook's privacy settings are a little confusing if you don't pay a lot of attention to them.
The Firefox extension Facebook Privacy Watcher seeks to correct that by color coding all of your
information in a way that you can quickly …